Abstract: Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall’s
Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness is a
difficult book, but an important one for scholars interested in
rhetoric, whiteness studies, and basic writing. It is an eclectic and
intricate set of musings on writing pedagogy, culture, and race, and
it is this eclecticism that both challenges the reader and opens new
possibilities for dialogue about the discursive and material
dominance of whiteness.

My initial challenge in writing this
review is simply to describe the book, as it explores personal
narrative, critical race theory, kitsch theory, the history of basic
writing, literary and student texts, classical rhetoric, rhetorics of
emotion, and more in rapid fashion. Ryden and Marshall’s primary
concern with creating a dialogue is reflected in the fact that each
author takes turns writing chapters; however, the dialogic quality is
also reflected within each chapter as the back and forth
between the experiential and the historical, the theoretical and the
pedagogical is somewhat dizzying. On a first read of the book, I
could not help but wonder how all these different ways of looking at
whiteness “speak” to each other, and I am not convinced that they
always do, at least in a direct way. However, that appears to be the
point of the book. Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of
Whiteness is not a Socratic dialogue, not a demonstration of
knowledge by a virtuoso under the guise of a conversation. Ryden and
Marshall’s text is provocatively argued, but it questions and
circles back on its own project in ways I have rarely seen. This
questioning and the text’s variety of approaches suggest an
openness to multiplicity and conflict on the part of the authors and
a recognition that such things are not only unavoidable when we
discuss race, but, in fact, essential if we are to further Zeus
Leonardo’s “goal of going ‘through race in order to have
any hopes of going beyond it’” (79)—an ideal Marshall
and Ryden refer to more than once. The complexity of the text is what
makes it significant, but it also requires that I take some time to
describe the book so that I can do it justice.

In Chapter One, Confessing
Whiteness: Performing the Antiracist, Liberal Subject, Ryden opens
with a personal narrative from her childhood where she “outs” her
whiteness, more specifically, her involvement in a racist society
that offers her race privilege. Central to this chapter is an
in-depth analysis of Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant, as an
example of a “redemption” narrative gone awry, but, most
interesting, perhaps, is Ryden’s insistence that narrative as a
genre is insufficient for white anti-racist subjects hoping to create
change. Whiteness narratives, she argues, inevitably re-center
whiteness by suggesting that a primary cultural goal is to heal the
injured white subject instead of confronting structural racism. Given
that the book begins with Ryden’s powerful narrative and that it
relies on personal narrative (in tandem with theory and textual
analysis) in both Ryden’s and Marshall’s chapters, this very
convincing argument is somewhat paradoxical. From the opening of
Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness, we are
supposed to consider how narrative is both indicative of the problem
of whiteness and a potential tool in solving this very
problem, a tension I turn to at the end of this review.

In Chapter Two, Whiteness (as) in
Basic Writing, Marshall describes his experiences as a British boy
raised by Jamaican parents who emigrate to East Orange, New Jersey.
This story opens the door to an analysis of the recent history of
basic writing, and Marshall reasserts Shor’s and Villanueva’s
ideas that basic writing may, respectively, be a form of apartheid
and colonialism. While little historical detail is added in this
discussion of Basic Writing, two things in this chapter stand out.
First, I appreciate Marshall’s analysis of Charles Chesnutt’s
The Wife of His Youth, which he nimbly interprets and positions
as a precursor to the bidialectal work of such contemporary scholars
as Gloria Anzaldua. Second, Marshall argues that “the project[s] of
Basic Writing and bidialectalism are themselves meditations on the
white space in composition studies; an inability to fully and
completely face the consequences of racism not just in language, or
on college campuses, but in U.S. culture generally” (60). While not
fully fleshed out, Marshall asks us here to conceptualize basic
writing in new ways. If basic writing in one sense represents
Composition Studies’ liberal accommodation of “the other”
(primarily students of color and working class students) since the
1970s, then Marshall suggests that these “others”—kept closer
to the structures of power but still in “their place” in the
basic writing class—continue to unwittingly sustain dominant
structures of whiteness.

Ryden’s Chapter Three, The
Kitsch of Liberal Whiteness and Bankrupt Discourses of Race
discusses our inability to sustain useful discussions about race
through the lens of kitsch theory. For Ryden, kitsch theory describes
an aesthetic, related to propaganda, that can be “understood not
merely as ‘fake’ or inauthentic but dangerous in its suppression
of ‘ugly’ truths in favor of a type of beauty that abets
totalitarianism and political control” (74). While kitsch, she
notes, “is often a synonym for bad taste and cheap art
reproductions” (74), kitsch theory is concerned as well with the
mass reproduction and trivialization of ideas, such as the meaning of
race in the US. In particular, Ryden asserts that contemporary
discourse on race, including classroom discussion, does not move
beyond nostalgic rhetorics of kitsch (mass produced, simplified and
often idealistic modes of historical discourse) and melancholic
discourses of kitsch (which “wallow in” difficult truths as
artistic modes rather than as tools of critique). She asks us to
consider how rhetorics of kitsch are at least partly responsible when
students roll their eyes at classroom talk of racism or when we, as a
culture, attempt, but too often fail, to confront racism—as in the
uproar over Don Imus’s racist remarks about Rutgers basketball
players several years ago (80). Suggesting that “it is
‘easy’ for white liberalism to characterize the Imus performance
as recidivism that warrants a scolding ” (83), Ryden argues that
our “scolding” of Imus (who lost his job, but reappeared on the
air shortly thereafter) was a way for White culture to “feel
better” without addressing ever-evolving forms of racism. Through
her analysis of the Imus situation and classroom interactions, Ryden
asks us to move beyond toothless, predictable discussions of race and
into a more self-aware discourse open to real change.

In Chapter Four, Whiteness,
Composition, and Enthymemes of Institutional Discourse, Marshall
draws on Aristotle’s notion of the enthymeme to understand his own
position as a Black writing instructor and WPA at two very different
institutions, and he makes thoughtful connections between the
personal and the structural as he imagines the ways New Critical
(and, by extension, current-traditional) notions of reading are
linked to “universal” notions of whiteness. The highlight of this
chapter is Marshall’s analysis of the university as institutional
rhetor and of two moments of student writing, one from an African
American man struggling to balance school and home cultures and the
second from a white, working class woman whose narrative exposes a
“failure of rhetoric in this culture…to clearly articulate
positions outside of” middle class whiteness (115). Marshall
ultimately posits that these two texts are complementary because
together they suggest how “race and class are made more complex by
the way each of them engage institutional whiteness” (115).

Chapter Five, Moving Whiteness:
Rhetoric and Political Emotion, considers the “‘sociality’
of emotion” (Ahmed, qtd. in Ryden and Marshall 121), the idea that
“‘the work of decolonization must occur at the affective level,
not only to reconstitute the emotional life of the individual but
also…to restructure the feeling or mood that characterizes an age’”
(Worsham, qtd. in Ryden and Marshall 122). In this chapter, Ryden
convincingly argues that whiteness studies has too often depended on
logic and rationality, while ignoring both the affective dimensions
of white identity and the fact that white people’s choice to hold
onto power is, in a very real sense, rational indeed. She then
analyzes two examples of white students’ responses to texts that
challenge whiteness and uses these responses to explore differences
between sympathy and empathy, guilt and shame. As she yokes complex
theories of the political/emotional to the classroom, Ryden urges us
to think “about the cultivation of emotional capacities for the
purposes of creating” alternatives to whiteness (129).

Chapter Six, Encountering
Whiteness as Resistance: Dialogue and Authority in the Composition
Classroom, is the last full chapter in the book (although there is
an Afterword that consists of a short dialogue between the two
authors). In this chapter, Marshall considers the question of stalled
dialogue from the perspective of a Black instructor teaching
primarily White students. How does a dialogue on race look from this
perspective, he asks, and how do the competing elements of
multiculturalism (the appreciation of difference) and of color
blindness (a refusal to see difference) help insulate White students
from discussing power and race—especially when their teacher is a
man of color? In response to this dilemma, Marshall offers the
example of Jody, a White student shaped by her small town and its
belief in White invisibility as well as by the “political
correctness” of her predominantly White classmates who accept
multiculturalism in school but politely refuse to engage with race in
complex ways. At the same time, she connects with the critical
pedagogy her Black teacher (Marshall) offers, and she begins to
consider her position in society more critically. Jody is full of
questions—about race and identity, power and its meaning—and
these questions serve as a springboard for discussions that go beyond
the discourses of kitsch that Ryden describes. Of course, Marshall
acknowledges that Jody’s engagement with race is not the norm among
White students (especially when they are faced with instructors of
color), but her example offers insight into the ways narrative about
and analysis of race may be used in the writing class.

In their Afterword, Ryden and
Marshall most explicitly address their dialogic method, as they
transcribe a discussion the two have about Jared French’s painting
Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone. For the first time,
they confront each other and their methodology in somewhat direct
ways. Ryden muses, for example, that “perhaps we’ve gotten
somewhere after all, at least by changing the terms of the debate….
Our essays are very different, and maybe are attempting to do
different things, but they ‘speak’ to each other, in the spirit
of open-ended dialogue that we’ve been so bold, or naïve, to place
our faith in” (158). The question, though, for the authors as well
as for the reader, is where that “somewhere” is and how the
essays they have written “speak to each other.” To answer this
question most clearly, if would be helpful if the authors clearly
described their theory of dialogue as well as how they see the
particular dialogue they engage in as contributing to an
“epistemology of whiteness in composition studies” (158).

What I find most dialogic in
Ryden and Marshall’s text is their ability to constantly circle
back and to question what they do, especially Ryden, who seems both
intent on including the personal narrative when addressing the
problem of whiteness and equally intent on discounting this mode
because it is as much a problem in the fight to decenter whiteness as
a solution. The question of personal narrative comes up repeatedly,
even as it is used consistently—and to good effect—by both
authors, and Ryden raises the issue in the Afterword when she writes,
“So as I point out about narrative performance…, once we confess
our whiteness, where does that leave us? Clean…? Or does it really
leave us nowhere at all? Or, worse yet, ready to reassert whiteness
when it is no longer convenient to be washed clean?” (155). Such
questions push the reader—the White reader—to engage in internal
dialogue about not only the methodological limitations of a study
such as this one but the ethical limitations as well, even as the
authors attempt to do what would appear to be the ethical thing:
confront structural racism. What is encouraging to me about this kind
of self-critical dialogue is that the authors view it as both
necessary (and never ending) but not as something that should
paralyze further questioning of whiteness because, their stories and
analysis suggest, the role of “whiteness” narratives can change,
especially when they are held up against and viewed through the lens
of narratives from those who have been considered “Other.”

In that sense, it is important to
note that, while it is Ryden who most forcefully analyzes and
critiques the problem of the personal narrative in whiteness studies,
Marshall has a good deal, at least implicitly, to say about this
issue as well. His take is different, as he is a Black male born
outside of the US, whose blackness is both very real, and yet
interrupted—in some ways—by his early years in another country
and by the fact that he speaks with a British accent and as a
representative of White institutions in his role as a WPA. Marshall
offers significant analysis of the problems of subjectivity as he
continually acknowledges that his experiences as a Black man affect
his teaching and his voice, but neither author fully engages how
Marshall’s chapters, and especially his personal narratives,
implicitly “speak back” to Ryden’s opening chapter that centers
the problem of narrative in whiteness studies. Given the complexity
of their subject positions (in terms of gender, class, and race) and
their willingness to explore issues of whiteness together, the
authors would appear to be in a prime position to consider how the
genre of the “whiteness narrative” is changing as other voices
get involved. Does whiteness get recentered when narratives of a
Black man’s experience with it are told? If so, does it get
recentered in the same way as when a white, working class woman tells
her stories? How can we draw on the multitude of stories about race
and whiteness being told today (which, while far from inclusive, are
much more diverse than they were 50 years ago) to create narratives
that do not simply establish the white subject as a subject in need
of “healing” but, instead, show whiteness as a complex set of
relationships that can—potentially, painfully—be revised?

Ryden and Marshall do not fully
address these questions, but they are in an excellent position to
take them up, and this comment is less a criticism of their current
text than an acknowledgement that their text takes us down many
complicated paths that should generate new directions for exploration
among scholars of race and rhetoric. Reading, Writing, and the
Rhetorics of Whiteness prods us to question ourselves and our
classrooms—along with our very place in the world—as it asks us
to play a role in the dialogue Ryden and Marshall have provocatively
taken up. We would be wise to accept their offer.